Introduction to the Humanities Special Issue on Shakespearean Performance

From the outset, my goal for this collection of essays has been to assemble a collage of snapshots that portray current thinking about and practices in the field of Shakespearean performance. What trends have developed or are still developing? What new evidence has come to light? How has theory intersected with textual study and theatrical practice?

I wanted the range to be as wide as possible because Shakespearean performance comes in many forms, whether amateur or professional, and embraces all manner of perspectives, whether contemporary theatrical practice; stage history; theater history; considerations of race, gender, class, sexuality, and culture; filmed performance; or adaptation. I also sought to include contributions by well-established scholars and practitioners alongside work by emerging writers. Collaboration would be welcome, as would illustrations and film clips. I hoped that contributors would represent not just colleges and universities, but also some the world’s most accomplished and innovative Shakespeare theaters. Finally, although I knew that many contributors, who were free to choose which plays they would focus on, would, of course, gravitate to the heavy-hitters like the great tragedies, others, I hoped, would spread the wealth over some comedies and some lesser discussed works—for example, Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet, and Cymbeline.

While I may not have fully achieved such desired breadth in every area, one additional aim that I think the issue fulfills is that of articles with voice. A significant number of the essays incorporate first-person narration and reflection. Many of those that lack the first person speak directly to the reader in ways that foster immediacy. Some are conversational; others lead the reader on an investigative trail; still others make the most of wit to engage their audience, often in debate.

Closely linked to the projection of voice is the attention to teaching that characterizes several of the essays. Darren Tunstall’s piece, “The Mask and the Giant,” Doreen Bechtol’s “Physical Dramaturgy,” Emily D. Bryan’s “The Untitled Othello Project,” Scott Maisano and Matthew Brown’s “The Tempest at the Sea-Marge,” and my article on teaching Love’s Labor’s Lost through performance take the reader into the authors’ classrooms as they enable students to perform—although in the case of one on that list, the classroom is the seashore on Nantucket. In each of these essays, preparing for performance or performance itself involves embodiment of some kind, conveying the heartbeat of live enactment.

In a similar vein, Paige Martin Reynolds escorts the reader onstage—as well as offstage—to experience live performance and the backstage work that enhances it. Reynolds also invites us into her performances as a variety of Shakespeare’s female characters, some of them with very few lines, and reviews how in those smaller roles she encountered reduced rehearsal time, collected backstage responsibilities and onstage business, and required choices for representing her characters’ periods of onstage silence. Her accounts of playing Ursula in Much Ado about Nothing, not once but twice, offer a rare glimpse into a role whose manifold significance can easily be overlooked.

Such an inside perspective has the power, in effect, to turn dramatic literature inside-out. In “Signs and Semblances,” James Newlin uses two recent film adaptations and one theatrical adaptation of Much Ado about Nothing to similar effect: to expose false assumptions about Shakespeare’s benightedness that modern adaptations seek to correct, but with the unintended consequence of distorting Shakespeare’s own implicit critique of social injustice. Adaptations that seek to determine an audience’s positive reaction to a character like Leonato run the risk of missing the play’s portrayal of his sexism toward Hero in the aborted wedding scene. An adaptation that turns the play’s foundational moral vision inside-out may well appear wrong-side-out, urging the restoration of its original right-side-out shape.

Adaptation, whether on stage or on film, laces through many of the essays in the collection. Vanessa Corredera’s reading of Fat Ham in “A Kind of Hamlet” explores the options of James Ijames’s play, which eventually wound up on Broadway, for negotiating predominantly white, commercial theatrical spaces. It also delineates “counterscripts” that Fat Ham poses to “historical racial scripts imposed on Black actors.” Subarna Mondal and Anindya Sen trace the Weird Sisters through three filmed adaptations of Macbeth in “‘Are ye fantastical?’: Shakespeare’s Weird Women in the 21st Century Indian Adaptations Maqbool, Mandaar, and Joji.” The authors contend that the fatalism associated with the witches, both by their “seeming absence as well as in their portentous presence,” ties together all adaptations of the play, from the west to the east, since 1606. They also demonstrate how each adaptation reflects specific topical, contemporary situations and circumstances within their own individual cultures.

So does Yu Jin Ko’s “Romeo and Juliet in Korea,” the subtitle of which, “Love and the War” speaks to his focus: the various ways in which “four representative but unique productions of the play” in Korea, from “the War period to the twenty-first century,” express the desire for reunification of North and South Korea. In addition to rendering vivid accounts of each performance, this affecting essay features an authorial voice that speaks to readers about the deep and long-held wish of many Koreans to erase the kinds of irrational borders that divide Montagues and Capulets.

Ko’s interest in how Shakespearean performance may be brought to bear on internal conflict within Korea corresponds with Amy Lidster’s article about appropriation of Shakespeare on the war front, particularly in Ukraine. Ultimately, her study asks what role art can play in an environment of war, and it explores the limitations of art like theater to provide relevance when up against the brutal realities of war. Performance can nevertheless “unite war and theater,” revealing “the power of narrative for shaping action and interpretation.”

Peter Holland, fresh off the task of editing King Lear in its fourth Arden iteration, also considers how cultural conditions shape performance, in this case particularly from the perspective of the audience to whom the play is presented. In “Enter Kent, Gloster, and Bastard,” he starts with the title page of the 1608 Quarto, which states that the play was performed for King James at Whitehall during the Christmas holidays, and from there contemplates how unexpected elements of the play resonate with unconventional audiences, such as those affected by harsh effects of aging or the onset of dementia. From this angle, Goneril and Regan may appear as recognizably fatigued, even sympathetic caregivers.

Anna Blackwell’s “Bad Shakespeare: Performing Failure” undertakes another cultural exploration. Its many entertaining and telling instances of cringe-worthy performances—like Derek Jacobi’s horrible acting as Jackson Hedley in an episode of Frasier and Shakespeare’s own portrayal of theatrical failure in act 5 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream—enable Blackwell to fathom what bad Shakespeare says about contemporary culture, particularly its relationship with the playwright presumed to be the finest in history. Characterizing these blatantly terrible examples of Shakesperean performances as meta-theatrical, filled as they are with “visible acting,” she asks whether they bolster Shakespeare’s already elevated stature or take him down a notch.

Entertaining multiple possibilities marks “The Untitled Othello Project” that is the subject of Emily Bryan’s article. Bryan describes a classroom of students who take on roles as they read painstakingly through the text of Othello, “focusing on identity, language, and the racist, patriarchal, and ableist constructs propping up Shakespeare’s play.” The students accept nothing from the playscript as necessarily valid or inviolable; every word is subject to examination. Bryan describes the process as “a transformative approach to Shakespeare studies around issues of pedagogy and performance.”

One of two essays on The Tempest, Christina Lynn Gutierrez-Dennehy’s “‘To blanch an Ethiop’: Motifs of Blackness in The Tempest and Ben Jonson’s Masque of Blackness” complements Bryan’s investigation of Othello. It queries the often noted tension in early modern drama between the cruelty of racism and the beauty of the language. Opening with the explosion of performances of The Tempest during the Pandemic, which corresponded in part with the Black Lives Matter movement, she points up the “violent anti-blackness” of Shakespeare’s characterization of Caliban. She adds dimension to her analysis by exposing “echoes” of Caliban’s characterization in Ben Jonson’s Masque of Blackness, whose narrative arc invokes British colonialism. Although a lesser known work, Jonson’s masque displays many elements of Shakespeare’s play; the two together begin to limn a cultural attitude.

The other essay on The Tempest, Scott Maisano and Matthew Brown’s “The Tempest at the Sea-Marge,” also mirrors Bryan’s essay in that it describes a class of students immersing themselves in the text over three days on Nantucket’s shore. They begin by close reading and performing exercises like shouting lines into the wind—forms of the “non-acting” referred to in the article’s subtitle. Paradoxically, however, projecting their lines over actual obstructive weather conditions illuminates the fictive weather conditions in the play by allowing actors to internalize their reactions to them. Progressively, the students add basic gestures (like flapping their arms as Ariel) and rudimentary props to move nearer to acting. The authors portray their project as playing with the play in a sand-box. Their extensive treatment of Caliban, together with Gutierrez-Dennehy’s, testifies to the enduring fascination of that character.

In addition to reflecting aspects of Bryan’s and Gutierrez-Dennehy’s essays, “The Tempest at the Sea-Marge” is in conversation with Doreen Bechtol’s piece about using collaborative devised theater to achieve embodied acting. In her words, the process she conducts with her class “allows students to wake up Shakespeare’s text in unexpected ways, embrace collaboration, and embody the richly detailed expression of Shakespeare’s poetic language.” She invites students to adopt various lenses on a given passage or scene—for example, time or space—helping them become aware of important dramatic elements that might otherwise escape their notice but that, once noticed, stand to add immeasurable texture to their performance.

Darren Tunstall’s essay “The Mask and the Giant” presents another pathway toward enriched performance. He argues that an actor can harness the tension in a Shakespeare play between social expectations of behavior and what he calls “reputation management”—how a character is seen by others. The result is less an individualistic conception of character than an understanding of any character as a “battleground,” determined by a larger, broader contradiction. Incidentally, I had the privilege of hosting Tunstall in my Performing Shakespeare class many years ago when he was on my campus to participate as an actor in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s residency. I’ll never forget his ingenious, rigorous teaching. The class he contributed to is the subject of my article, “’A little academe’: How Teaching through Performance Illuminated Love’s Labor’s Lost.”

Concluding with a brief commentary on John Marks’s lyrical, largely personal essay returns me to the theme of voice, in which “The Music Next Door” abounds. Writing about a long-lived Shakespearean reading group of which he’s been a part in Northampton, Massachusetts, for many years, Marks reminds the reader that, at its heart, Shakespearean performance is about social connection through the playwright’s extraordinary language. The group’s composition shifts from one monthly meeting to another, but the ethos remains steady. “None of us are actors by trade,” he writes. “We are teachers, entrepreneurs, artists, academics, graphic designers, musicians, documentarians, various kinds of retirees… We are a community of amateurs who enjoy the loose nature of the experience.” For me, reading Marks’s essay is a reminder that Shakespeare’s survival over the centuries has relied in part on such informal, but highly appreciative and literate, performance. It is free but invaluable.